Carousel

• Track Listing

It HAD to be a mistake. They put me in PIANO lessons instead of guitar lessons. I guess my rockstar dad (lead guitarist of Hollow Spirit) thought it'd be real funny to have me practicing Mozart instead of learning how to shred like Hendrix or Page. And being the A.D.D. goofball that I was, they also had to put me in theater, I guess. Combine the two, and 12 years later you get a young man with two degrees in Music Theater, a minor in Jazz Piano, and Directing, and a resume overflowing with Broadway shows, a cappella groups, circus experience, and music directing/composing experience. But NO ROCK. During my LAST semester in college, a couple of the guys in the band for shows I used to music direct, decided that instead of dicking around and playing classic rock covers for each other during our rehearsal breaks, that it'd be really cool to actually perform them for others. Well we did. And we absolutely blew the roof off that sold out little 300 seat cafe. And that's when it hit me. Some things you just can't escape. And 'like father, like son', I was built to melt faces. And on that night, DOMIN8TRX was born. We knew that releasing an album would be the most important thing to defining ourselves as a band, so we moved to New York City and immediately began work on our album, CAROUSEL. As artists and musicians we write about what we know - the experiences, thoughts, and emotions that we encounter in real life. When I first began to write for Carousel, I had just gotten out of a two year relationship with my college sweetheart, which was really difficult, and like most serious relationships, took me a looong time to come to terms with. It was this relationship that helped me pen Carousel's first song, and was my launching point into the album. Carousel is essentially an exegesis on LOVE. Each song shares a different viewpoint on love based on where that 'character' is in love's timeline. From breakup and hardships, to silly, young love, new love, absence of love and everything in between, Carousel is an attempt to provide as complete an investigation of love and it's many facets as possible. I've really enjoyed the image of a Carousel as a metaphor for love. For obvious reasons, a Carousel goes round and round unendingly, much like love's cycle. We all find love, lose it and then find it again; some more than others. But we all do it. And much like young children wanting to ride a Carousel, everyone wants to be in love, no matter how much we sometimes fight it. Even though we continually get hurt with love, we keep coming back because of how good it can be. It's really a huge thrill ride. Which is another reason I like the image of a Carousel because, well, it's also a ride. We knew we wanted the music of Carousel to reflect ALL our individual influences, and basically just wanted to create the most AWESOME album we could think of. We really took our time coming up with EVERY LITTLE melodic line and lyric on the album - not settling for anything that we didn't absolutely LOVE. On the album you'll hear a classic rock/blues influenced sound with a lot of Country, Jazz, Pop, Soul, and R&B influences thrown in the mix. There are some Prog Rock tendencies, some Latin, Funk, A Cappella, and Opera/Orchestral flavors thrown in. Even Dance/Disco somehow made it onto our album. You'll hear a lot of high acrobatic singing, great melodic lines, catchy choruses, guitar shredding, piano ripping, piano-guitar duels, orchestral stuff, a cappella stuff...... We didn't just want to settle on one thing.... so we decided to throw EVERYTHING we loved to listen to into a GIANT blender and see what would come out. Exactly TWO YEARS later, and our baby Carousel is finally ready to be released to the world. We hope that you LOVE listening to it as much as we LOVED making it! Enjoy! ~Dominique Scott (Lead Singer of Domin8trx)